


cornix cornicatur

by puny



Category: Fate/Zero
Genre: Alcohol, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-10
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-02-20 13:53:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2431226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/puny/pseuds/puny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some pieces from after the last war and before the next.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. happy hour

Saber scans the bar, ignoring the drunk men with their arms around womens' waists and the shrilly blaring television. A man lounges against wall at four o'clock, as handsome as she remembers. He plays darts idly — a flick of the wrist, a thunk as they hit the bullseye one after another. Nobody else pays him attention. 

"Saber," he says, mole twitching upwards in a smile. "I was getting bored with no one here to talk to."

Saber moves towards him and pretends she does not feel his eyes watching her steps, her hands, her vital points.

"I am not here for idle chitchat," she tells him, taking a stool at the bar.

"Of course not." Lancer throws his last dart. She doesn't look but can feel it sticking in the board, twanging with impact. He seats himself beside her. "But you may as well be. I have all the time in the world to waste on idle chitchat."

Her throat closes. She signals the bartender for a pint and does not look at Lancer, though she feels him watching her neck bob with the first foaming gulp.

"Does it taste like regret?" he asks. She sets it down harder than she should,   
beer froth slopping over the rim and soaking into the black of her gloves.

"I did not know," she replies, quiet under the tinny cheering of the men on the screen playing some incomprehensible sport. "I would not—"

"Betray?" Quiet, unblinking. A single lock of hair twists in front of his face and she feels sick, absurd, wants to fight him again, wants the clang of blade on lance. She wants to dance with him, Excalibur in her fist and Gáe Dearg in his. Instead, this. 

Saber nods. "I would not betray. I did not know."

"I know," says Diarmuid Ua Duibhne more quietly than he ever spoke in life. When she looks over, blood is spreading over his diaphragm, dark as tar where it seeps out between the seams of his armor. He meets her eyes and the alcohol roils in Saber's gut: this ghost still blames her.

"Forgive my ignorance."

"The dead do not forgive so easily as the living repent, king."

"I know," she says, and she has had this conversation before, she has been through this time and time again, the same dead man in a dozen busy bars and the guilt heavier but more distant and useless every time: like she is wasting away inside her gilded armor, alone with alcohol that does nothing to dull her senses. He feels real, beside her. She feels not like a king.

"Man," he muses, "to corpse, and corpse to legend, legend to holy spirit and, glory of glories, holy spirit to common poltergeist."

"The King of Knights has failed you, knight. I do not deserve the title."

"You do, though." The blood is gone. He takes a sip of beer: not from one of the glasses the bar serves, but from a dented tankard. Stronger ale, wilder yeasts. A memory of banquets past. "My hate is fixated. Unpleasant, but it is a part of me. I am just a shade, but you are a spirit, Pendragon, closer to alive than I. You should not come to visit me any longer. I am surprised you still do, after this long." 

"You are not." 

He smirks into the tankard. "No, I'm not."

She does not bother to tell him the thousand ways she would be unable to live with herself if she stopped. He knows.

Instead, she asks: "What would happen if I cease coming to see you?"

The remnants of Lancer lean back, puzzled. "I'm not sure. Disappear, likely. I believe my prolonged existence is fueled by you; the grip of your guilt is stronger than the veil of death, it seems."

She closes her eyes as he goes on. "I think I will live on in the curse I laid on the Grail, too. Funny, the things that bar me from eternal peace. Spite. Vengeance. Betrayal. You."

She does not have to look to know the blood is back on his chest, streaming from his thin lips, bright against his fingers. "You will live on in other things, I swear it. You will. I will preserve your name, your honor, your deeds."

Diarmuid laughs. "Artoria Pendragon," he says so gently she wants to drown, "you are no bard."

He is too close, somehow more real and more present than any other being around, tall and muscled: the stuff of legends utterly ignored by every being in the room except her as he sips beer. Can he taste, she thinks. Can he think. Is he anything except a dummy, here to hate — and only hate — me, and only me?

"We will fight again," she replies, after a long moment. "In another war. The Fifth Holy Grail War. If not, the Sixth, the Seventh. The Hundredth, if that is what it takes. We will settle this score."

Diarmuid's smile is so warm, when she turns to look. 

"Always war. How many times will you die on the battlefield, Saber?" 

"Until we fight again." 

"But we will not fight." 

She looks at the thing that is not Lancer. 

"I desired only to serve honorably and die honorably." A drop of blood slides down his cheekbone and into his tankard. "I asked that much, and it was denied me. I died with my own spear through my spine and a curse on my lips, King." 

She bows her head, grief as heavy as any claymore. 

"You should know this much. I will not be returning to the Holy Grail War." 

She grits her words out from between her teeth. "You lie, ghost." 

"No." His lock of hair shakes with his head. "I am simply the embodiment of my last, bitter oath, Saber. I exist to torment you." 

Saber does not speak. 

"Although," he says, "I do not need to. You do a fine job of it yourself." 

"Am I mad," she asks of him, knuckles tight beneath fine black doeskin. "Am I mad." 

Lancer smiles, scarlet coursing down his chin, spattering the floor. "You would not allow yourself the luxury."


	2. once and future

Saber blinks. 

The world coalesces around her, or she coalesces into it: impossible to tell. Either way, she understands instinctively that she has been summoned. The sensation is equally as unpleasant as it has always been, condensing out of myth, but this time not into reality, not quite: an image, close but so slightly off. 

She has heard of the hanging gardens of Babylon. One of the Seven Wonders of the World, if she recalls correctly, and the one she knows least about. It swallows her now: sunlight streams down on her through a lush hemispheric roof high overhead, woven out of root and vine instead of brick. Pillars support it, polished chert and obsidian and swirling marble of every shade. Every possible surface is carved deep with hieroglyphics, long-lost graphemes inlaid with rose gold and turquoise and chips of agate. She understands, now, why the Gardens were one of the Wonders: trees surround her with their perfect fractal geometries, olive and rosewood, dates and pomegranates, ferns thrice her height. She can hear the roar of a river below and behind her. The Tigris. If she were mortal, she might not have recognized the Gardens as a facade, but they are too sparkling, too perfect. Built out of the same shifting history as her. More mirage than monument. 

"Welcome," says the King. A flock of jewel-bright birds takes flight from a tree beside her. 

Gilgamesh looks smug as ever, comfortable in his old domain. His throne is gilded— no, not gilded. Her mouth turns down at the corners. Solid gold. A white tiger strung with ropes of gems and precious metals stirs its tail lazily at his feet. He wears only a bolt of linen around his waist, secured with a golden chain. This is her first glimpse of his tattoos, scarlet angles as bright as his eyes criscrossing his torso. 

"Why have you called me." Around her feet, she now realizes, is the familiar summoning circle. He has of course laid it down in a thin layer of shining gold. 

"You look out of place, king of Britannia," he teases. "Do you miss the incessant drizzle of your homeland? Does your heart long for a dank and drafty castle?"

Her gauntlet clanks as her hand tightens into a fist. She does, of course. Memories come back to her, of fog on the moors, a familiar birch wood.

"Folly, to keep this fake past."

His eyes narrow. 

"We all yearn, Saber. You hate the realm we were summoned to as much as I. You despised your Master, your supposed ally, as much as I tired of mine." 

"Is that what you desire? No more masters?" She knows her voice is heavy with contempt. "How does it feel, to be a king and yet a slave?" 

His lip curls. "Master is only a name. I desire very little, now, except for you to accept my proposal." 

This does not come as a surprise to Saber, only a nuisance. She heaves a sigh. "I fail to see any reason to wed you, now, ever, and forever." 

He points. "Read it." 

She looks at a pillar to her left; The magics of the Holy Grail War grant her universal literacy and fluency in all tongues, even this script older than herself. 

“How can I be silent?" she reads out loud, feeling his red irises fixed on her. "How can I rest, when Enkidu, whom I love, is dust, and I too shall die, and be laid in the earth forever?”

The white tiger at his feet deflates, blackens and crumbles until it is a pile of dust and a cracking skeleton, gold and gemstones clattering to the ground atop a sooty stain. It looks out of place in the opulence of the Gardens.

"You won. Why would you not wish for him back?" 

"A miracle can only do so much. Peaceful rest is... the least he deserves."

Saber remembers the sound of Berserker's helmet hitting the ground, Lancelot's bulging eyes. She can emphasize. 

He catches the understanding in her eyes, leaning forward between the arms of his golden seat. "You get it. You see. We are as close to a kind as we shall find, each other. I could please you. You have seen what I am capable of, and I you. We could be something powerful together. Something better." 

"What power?" Saber asks. 

"What?" 

"What power?" she repeats. "We are _stories,_ king of dead Babylon, I know you have not forgotten. We are tools to be used."

His knuckles tighten on the throne. "I am absolute! I could bring any planet to ashes. I wield Ea!" 

"Only when permitted. What about now? Just one more ghost with ideas above its station." 

_"The entire world is my garden until the end of time."_

To Saber it sounds rehearsed.

"And to what end? You are lonely in this garden, king of kings." 

"Gods," he spits, "do not get lonely." 

"Perhaps not," she agrees. "But you are not all god." 

Gilgamesh looks murderous. She does not fear him, not here, not now, between wars. They are spirits. She understands that she is inside his consciousness at the moment. The old hospitality laws may be dead elsewhere, but in the mind they still apply: with no mana the worst he can do is eject her, and the King of Heroes seems desperate for her audience. 

"I am sorry," she says, softly, hating him still, but knowing his pain. "About Enkidu. About what we are." 

Thunder passes over his face. The gardens begin to dissolve around her. Each leaf sloughs away into dust until the branches are bare and then those too, cracking and collapsing into splinters. The birds rot midair, shed disintegrating feathers as they fall, land as crumbles of bone.

"Whore," the king growls. The pillars shudder and their mosaic scales of turquoise and carnelian flake off. 

"Such slander, for your would-be wife," the other king smiles. 

Fissures crack and split around their feet, and seconds later, great hunks of the Gardens are breaking off into the roaring Tigris. 

"In the next war," he bites out. "In the next war, I kill you." 

"Good luck," she says, still smiling. The last she sees before a boulder crushes her apparition is Gilgamesh, red eyes bright with fury, still clutching his golden throne.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haha wow this is v long overdue


End file.
